


Recreated

by morganya



Category: Bandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dystopia, Amnesia, Brain Injury, M/M, Medical Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-26
Updated: 2013-01-26
Packaged: 2017-11-26 23:19:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,727
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/655485
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/morganya/pseuds/morganya
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for no_tags 2013, with the prompt Pete/Gabe - amnesia.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Recreated

"I don't trust a bartender who doesn't drink," the customer says when Pete turns down the offer of Lith.

"There are _so many_ reasons not to trust me, Mac," Pete says. "Why fixate on the obvious?"

The customer still looks suspicious, but once he downs his shot he gets placid. Pete picks up the shot glass.

There's a trick to all of this. There are five places that he needs to be aware of at work: the stockroom, the closet with the cleaning supplies, the restrooms, the back with the disposal units, and the actual bar itself. The bar can be a pain in the ass because of all the various mini-points of contact, but he does okay. He holds the glass in his hand and mentally ticks off the places it doesn't belong. Not on top of the bar with the Lith, not in the ice bin, not back in front of the customer – eventually he gets to the recomposer and that seems like the most likely choice.

He pulls the glass in the nearly full recomposer and hits the on button. It's a quiet night, so he has to listen to the machine noise, which he hates; the recomposer hisses and shudders as it recycles the glasses and creaks as it reconstitutes them, and it always makes his skin crawl.

Luckily after a second, a woman comes in and sits at the end of the bar, so he has an excuse to get away from the recomposer and go over to her, saying, "What'll it be, Suzie Q?"

At the end of the night, he coats every surface with sanitizer and puts whatever can't be recomposed in the disposal units out back. He's going to get his coat when his boss comes out of the back office. He says, "Pete."

"One second, Mac," he says, buttoning his coat.

"My name is Dave, Pete," his boss says wearily. "Can you check the restrooms?"

"I hate the restrooms," Pete lies.

"No, you don't. You just forget to check them."

"I got things on my mind," Pete says, and goes to restock the restrooms.

When he comes back out, his boss is behind the bar pouring a shot. He looks up and says, "Done?"

"You could eat off the floor."

"Sounds good." His boss takes a shot. "We got a case of raspberry Lith in this morning. Want to take some home to your fella?"

"It'll just go to waste, Mac," Pete says. "You staying here tonight?"

His boss pours another drink. "Looks like it."

The apartment building is small and ugly, but Pete always feels relieved when he gets there. He unlocks the front door and starts to call, "Honey, I'm home," but he only gets as far as "Honey, I'm –" before Gabe tacklehugs him and they're both on the floor.

They roll around on the carpet for a while, and Gabe's crooning his name and laughing, and it makes him happy. Finally Gabe stops wrassling with him.

"How was your day?" Pete asks, and Gabe just grins and shrugs.

The telescreen is humming away, so it seems like a good idea to watch for a while. Pete isn't sure what's playing; it looks like a soap opera, but maybe it's just the news.

"Work was boring," he tells Gabe.

"You should quit," Gabe says, playing with his hair.

"Oh, great idea," he says.

"It makes total sense. If you don't like it, quit. I'll keep you in the style you're accustomed to."

Gabe doesn't have a job. "Oh, okay," Pete says.

"What are we watching?" Gabe asks. "Did you turn this on?"

Pete looks at the telescreen. "I have no idea what this is."

*****

The woman in the corner is crying. Pete's cleaning the corner when he hears her. Ordinarily he would finish what he's doing and quietly retreat to a neutral location, but he has to clean up about five hundred empty glasses for the recomposer, and he can't help but overhear.

She says to the guy sitting next to her, "But it wasn't serious, the police said it wasn't serious, if he hadn't gotten pinched those other times, they'd just let him off. But the judge said one more time and he'd get reidentified. My mom keeps crying about how she's going to lose him and I –"

The guy sitting next to her says, "Calm down, it isn't up to you what happens. Quit crying now. I'll get you something to make it go away. Bartender!"

Pete puts down the armful of glasses and takes out his order pad. The guy orders a large cherry Lith. Pete goes and brings it to the table, saying, "Here you go, Suzie Q." The woman takes the Lith without looking at him and downs it. Almost instantly she stops crying and her face smoothes out. When Pete finally gathers the empty glasses, she's laughing.

Pete goes back behind the bar. The sound of the recomposer makes him want to throw up. There's no getting away from it: everything in the world is broken down and slapped back together, recreated empty and blank and unaware. He would take off running from the bar but they need the pay.

Pete gets home and Gabe grabs him and swings him around the room, like he's been away for years. Pete says, "I had a bad day today."

"What happened?"

He thinks about it, but he can't call up anything beyond a vague feeling of unease. Finally he just shrugs. Gabe puts an arm around his shoulders and says, "Well, you can get fussed over anyway. Tell me about it if it comes to you."

*****

Gabe wakes him in the middle of the night, shaking his shoulder and whispering urgently in his ear. Pete comes to groggily, and it takes a second to orientate himself.

"Pete," Gabe says, "it's okay, I figured out how to get us out of here. I'll get you into Medical, you just need to make sure they delete our names from the registry. We'll just walk right out of here."

He's pretty sure if he were any less awake he would get sucked into Gabe's head right along with him. As it is he can feel their bed and see their ugly familiar walls and know the right things to say.

"Gabe," he says. "That already happened. We're not there anymore, we got out. This is our place. We're not there anymore."

Gabe pauses. His eyes flick back and forth.

"We're not there anymore," Pete says.

"Are you sure?"

"Positive."

"Oh," Gabe says. "Well, I'll stay awake just to be sure."

"Okay," Pete says, and Gabe curls protectively around him, keeping a watchful eye on the dark.

*****

His boss asks him when he comes into work, "Why don't you have your fella come in one of these nights?"

Pete doesn't know what to answer. Throwing Gabe into a place where he doesn't know anyone, hasn't learned the landscape enough to navigate it, seems unnecessarily cruel to him. He can't imagine what it's like to be Gabe sometimes, where the world recreates itself every few minutes into something new and shocking, and there's no way to be put in context. He has a feeling that he's the only thing that Gabe can rely on, and he's a pretty piss-poor excuse for competent.

"Oh," his boss says. "Maybe he doesn't drink either."

It's an out and Pete takes it. "You got it, Mac," he says. "We're two of a kind."

*****

Pete no longer remembers what he did to get him sentenced for reidentification. The technicians took that part of him away. He has a few flickers that might be from who he was before: his mother had dark eyes, he kicked another boy in the shins, his name, and a scrap of a song that his father sang, melody and most of the lyrics forgotten.

He'd shouted what he could remember at the technicians, clinging onto it to prevent them from taking everything away. _Say you'll be true and never leave me blue_. A number of technicians quit. He took some pride in that.

Gabe had been there longer than he had, maybe. He never knew what Gabe had done to wind up there, either. They probably shouldn't have been housed together, but it might have been a way to keep an eye on them. It didn't work.

He supposed he'd fallen for Gabe right away. Gabe was sharp-edged and wild, but he seemed like he saw something worthwhile in Pete. It was something to hold onto, after the treatment sessions that left his head crackling with electricity and not much else. He had lost most of everything, but he wasn't going to lose Gabe too.

It was Gabe who really got them out. Pete had never been able to figure out how exactly he managed to get out of the restraints in Medical; all he knew was that he'd been in the unit and been paged into the examination room. Gabe had the technician in a death grip, hovering over the computers, and it must have taken every ounce of will he had to keep from losing focus until Pete got there.

Pete stood and watched as the technician erased both their names from the registry, the last step in the reidentification process. He sedated the technician. He walked out of the complex with Gabe and they kept on walking.

He knows how much he's lost. Whatever led up to him going into reidentification is mostly gone. He has his name, his anger, his mother's eyes, his father's song. He's got Gabe. He's willing to live with all of that.

*****

They're watching the telescreen before bed. There are horses and dogs in the broadcast. Pete hasn't been paying attention to it other than that.

"That's a cute dog," Gabe says.

"Which one?"

"The black and white one."

"He needs to be combed, but yeah."

"He needs something. I had the same kind of dog when I was a kid. We had to wash him every day."

"Bet he appreciated it," Pete says.

"I hope so."

Maybe what Gabe says is real. Maybe it's not. Pete isn't going to question it. He settles against Gabe's chest and keeps his eyes open. If he tries really hard, he might be able to make this second a memory that lasts.


End file.
